What does it feel like? Shakespeare’s Experiential Ethics

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What can Shakespeare – or literature more generally – tell us about ethics? In the Pacific Views Talk for Spring 2026, Professor Jim Kearney (English) discusses the ways that Shakespearean theater invites its audiences to be entertained by the vicarious experience of the ethical, often ethics in some extreme or impossible circumstance. 

What does it feel like to be enjoined to avenge your father’s death? What is it like to banish your daughter or disavow your community? To forgive the unforgivable? To murder? Shakespeare and his fellow early modern playwrights inherited and developed rhetorical and philosophical practices geared toward the creation of immersive virtual experience. 

This talk approaches Shakespearean theater as a lab or platform in which the experience of ethics in extreme circumstances is simulated. Drawing on his new book Shakespearean Ethics in Extremity: Phenomenology, Theater, Experience (Oxford University Press, 2025), Kearney investigates Shakespeare’s attempts to capture – or conjure or discover or create – forms of what we might call ethical experience.

Jim Kearney is a Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at UCSB. He specializes in early modern literature with research interests that include ethical experience, the history of emotion, phenomenology (including the phenomenology of theater), various materialisms, religious identity and transformation, and the history of reading. 

Kearney’s approximately 45-minute presentation will be followed by a Q&A session.

This event may be photographed or recorded.

Advance registration is recommended as space is limited.